News of News For Bears and Bulls

Ethereum miners are back with the hashrate rising a bit recently, while transactions are at a yearly high.

There’s a feeling of Sparta as the second biggest network tests resistance at $270. That’s crossed, and then we’re looking at $324.

Send us your best easy peasy memes. We needs free content for our featured images as we then wait for resistance at $370, followed by blaze it $420 and so on at $70s and $20s all the way up to Musk.

If of course that’s how it goes. It might not. Unlike the 4chan guy, we’re from the present.

Bitcoin is seemingly taking a bit of a break as everyone there waits for over $9,000.

Thankfully the memes there are aplenty. We don’t even need to ask thanks to all those bitcoin art Monday/posts. Some of them are pretty good.

It’s spring giving way to summer. Clear skies in London as optimism appears to be back with the US economy booming.

Thanks Trump. We won’t stop winning. Been a long time, long time, since a president shutted up Fed. We won’t forget.

Politics aside cus we’re not left or right, we’re inderpendents, but if we were in charge of that nobel committee, we’d take away the peace prize from Obama’s wars and acknowledge the lion.

One bit more in this prelude before we get to news. Twamp said he gone big July 4th, huge. We hope all good Americans join for it is time to celebrate the return of global peace.

We start with a somewhat cryptic article by a “guest writer” for CCN which says “Deloitte believes strongly in multi-platform development, and 50% of our projects are built on Ethereum,” according to Antonio Senatore, Global CTO for Deloitte’s Blockchain.

Apparently we’re to expect the launch of “a very large project by the end of the year on the Ethereum platform.”

Deloitte as you might know is EY’s competitor, both being one of the Big Four accounting firms. Clearly they’re “fighting” on who is more advanced in blockchain aspects.

EY arguably takes the lead for now with a bet on the public ethereum blockchain. That’s one of the first, and their work on zksnarks could be interesting, as is the below video.

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Companies have so far stayed out of the public blockchain because they needed to develop basic skills in a safe environment like a private blockchain or a testnet.

They’ve also perhaps stayed out because of capacity concerns, but there they can test out all sorts of second layer – or better called compression – technologies that could be a lot more important than the blockchain part where competition is concerned.

That’s because obviously anyone can use the blockchain, but how it is used could be a competitive advantage if one could for example merge the security of the base chain with the convenience from a user perspective of compression tech.

Another cryptic article is by Coindesk’ Alyssa Hertig who must have written it through her teeth because we can’t quite make much sense of it at all.

It appears EDF is basically trying a Golem like service that tries to utilize the unused GPU power of ordinary people’s laptops for image rendering, modeling, graphics, that sort of thing.

The blockchain part here is presumably relevant in as far as payments are concerned, with EDF blockchain engineer Gilles Deleuze stating:

“Development of distributed computing is a credible scenario for the future, and blockchain may be a nice lever in this scenario. So, let’s explore it.”

Sure, why not. Although for an energy company there might be a lot more relevant aspects to explore, like peer to peer blockchain smart grids to connect the solar power of ordinary homes or electric car chargers, but it’s a start.

Apparently 376 people hold 30% of all eth, while 448 people own 20% of all Bitcoin, with the numbers being so specific because they’re obvious estimates.

By comparison, just six people own half of the world’s wealth and for decades now the direction there has been towards more and more concentration of wealth.

While for cryptos, the direction has generally been towards the dispersion of wealth because there’s a fundamental structural difference that can be summarized by: there are no interest payments at the money creation level in cryptos.

“Request for expression of interest from prospective solution providers in anticipation of a feasibility project for the issuance of electronic legal tender – a central bank digital currency issued and backed by the South African Reserve Bank.”

The use of the word backed there is interesting because the most they can mean is the fall back to gold reserves that they might hold if things go south. But, that’s hardly backing as by that point it would be a bit too late.

Such digital cash moreover is already a reality because loved or hated, tether is pretty much digital cash.

The bank is presumably thinking of getting rid of tether, which arguably is an intermediary, and so doing their job themselves.

Their concern is people might not store such digital cash with banks, which then can not print money out of thin air, raising all sorts of complications.

At the same time, however, that acknowledges the privileged position of banks. Like ordinary people can’t invest in start-ups by the force of law, but banks and rich people can, so too ordinary people can’t have access to almost free credit, but banks and rich people can.

Hence the rich get richer, not by accident, but by system design and by laws that enforce their unjust privileges.

Blockstream is now apparently turning its Liquid blockchain into a platform for issuing tokens. Samson Mow, Blockstream’s CSO, says:

“Blockchain platforms like ethereum are failing them due to issues with scaling, privacy, and reliability. […] Now, with the launch of Liquid Securities, businesses can quickly issue Liquid-based security tokens with the click of a button, and establish sophisticated rulesets to conform with their regulatory requirements with no engineering experience required.”

Liquid as you might know is a trusted, effectively private, sidechain that can allow for bitcoin to be transferred to this new network controlled by about 15 exchanges.

It can have its own uses, but it’s a cop-out of sorts because it’s basically a private blockchain as you can’t run your own node of it.

With ethereum, the Beacon chain can basically be seen as a sidechain. The way this works is that you run the eth 1 nodes and the eth 2 nodes together and get them to “talk” through smart contracts.

This idea can then be extended to running or creating in a permissionless manner any sidechain you like as ConsenSys recently detailed.

Alright, we’ll leave you with a demo of a smart car charging automatically through an ethereum sidechain by an Austrian start-up called Easelink.

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It’s happening is it? All these things we were talking about were actually true were they?

Well, we’ll have to wait and see. But it is beginning to look like maybe it is happening.